Re: [libreoffice-users] cannot convert text to number in spreadsheet from csv file

On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 20:05:40 PM +0200, Marco Fioretti wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I have the problem below with LO 3.5.7.2 on a Fedora box.
>
> I have a shell script that generates and save to a text file called synthesis.csv many lines like 
> this:

thanks to all who quickly answered yesterday. Here are more details,
based on your initial comments and suggestions.

I am indeed Italian and in Italy, but this is happening on a Fedora
Linux computer with US English as system language. The shell
environment has LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and "English (USA)" is the default
language in Libreoffice. In the text import form of Calc, charset is
western europe(ascii/us), language is english(usa) and all columns
have standard format header (but changing the charset to utf8 and/or
the format of the interested column to text, or "US english" doesn't
make any difference

Besides, I do not paste anything into a new spreadsheet, I directly
open the result of the script with Calc at the shell prompt, and then
(need to) work on that file in calc, savint it as .ods:

#> cat sources.*txt | ./analyzer.pl > analysis_result.csv ; oocalc analysis_result.csv

the two sample lines in my original email 

|||2013-02-15|Payment A|-100.25|008|fae|
|||2013-03-15|Payment B|-50.25|008|fae|

where actual lines from analysis_result.csv (which has ASCII encoding,
according to the "file" command), which you may save as test.csv file
and load in calc to see what happens (of course, the result would
depend on YOUR locale, default language etc, but that IS the actual
text I am working on).

Summarizing, it seems I need some efficient way to tell Calc, when it
opens that file, that all the cells of a certain column, except the
header, are NUMBERS, not text, in the -1234.12 format.

The reason / end goal is that I and the other final users of that csv
file must be able to quickly add formulas to that spreadsheet and have
them work as expected without manual reformatting/rewriting of those
columns.

thanks,
        Marco
-- 
M. Fioretti http://mfioretti.com                   http://stop.zona-m.net

Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you

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